Readers familiar with Scott Messing’s monumental two-volume Schubert in the European Imagination,Footnote ¹ who take up his latest publication in anticipation of the author’s unique approach to reception history, colourful writing style and extraordinary ability to enliven the results of extensive archival work through imagination and compelling argument will suffer no disappointment. Yet, many will be surprised by the scale of its achievement. Notwithstanding its more confined subject matter – the life and afterlives of Schubert’s Marche militaire No.1 (pub. 1826) – and comparatively modest dimensions, this ‘poor orphan to the hefty manuscript’ (p. xi) makes a far broader and, for this reviewer, more lasting statement regarding the possibilities of academic scholarship than does its towering older sibling.

Although Messing’s two monographs on Schubert are broadly concerned with tracing the ways by which music accrues cultural meaning, their starting blocks differ significantly. The two volumes of Schubert in the European Imagination trace the proliferation of Robert Schumann’s Mädchencharakter portrayal of Schubert in literature, visual art and music, and as such chronicle the history of an aspect of reception. Their impetus is to explore the extent to which a particular image of Schubert permeated the subsequent reception of his music, while making a larger point regarding his position in (and influence on) gendered cultural politics. The fulcrum around which Marching to the Canon revolves, alternatively, is Schubert’s ostensibly innocuous march for piano four hands, D. 733, the first of three military marches published as a single opus (Op. 51), and which stands at just 110 bars. The decision to dedicate an entire book-length study to a work of such unassuming generic lineage, whose impact on the development of musical style in the nineteenth century or on Schubert’s mature instrumental music could be deemed negligible, might (as the author acknowledges) seem dangerously limiting. Yet it is precisely because of this more modest starting point that Messing is able to trace the ‘entire public ontogeny’ (p. xiii) of the work from its original publication intended for domestic consumption, through various arrangements and adaptations on the world stage, to its symbolic use as a tool of political and commercial propaganda in both European and American culture. Moreover, nothing in this volume smacks of dogged insistence to inaugurate the work into the echelons of musicological consciousness (even less, the musical canon); on the contrary, this exceptional book offers a fascinating case study in just how deeply and creatively a single work may be explored.

The extraordinary range of sources and the ends to which they are employed in this book extend far beyond what we might identify as ‘reception studies’. As Messing clarifies, he is concerned with ‘reception and effect’ (p. xv) in the tradition of Wirkungsgeschichte (p. xii), which embraces the ‘effect, impact, response’ (p. xii) of a work. What this means in practice is that the first large section (chapters 1–3) constitutes the more familiar type of reception history, outlining the Marche militaire’s compositional, publication and performance history in its original form, and in a plethora of subsequent reincarnations. This lays the foundation for the second part (chapters 5–8) in which the exploration of the work explodes outwards towards a consideration of its usage in dance (chapter 5) literature (chapter 6), film (chapter 7) and other musical works (chapter 8). A central chapter chronicling the march in the war-torn territory from the Franco-Prussian War to the end of the Second World War separates these two sections. The result is an ambitious reimagining of reception history. Messing is interested less in what others have written about the Marche militaire in newspapers and journal articles (although these items are also present), than he is in demonstrating the impact the work had on the creation of further art (literature, dance, film, music), and what that tells us about the march’s widespread familiarity and versatility.

The work’s chameleon-like adaptability is a central theme of the monograph, and Messing returns to it repeatedly (pp. 61, 63, 132–3, 206–7) to reinforce how deeply ingrained into public and popular consciousness the work became over the course of its life. Schubert’s original Marche militaire, Messing writes, ‘was sufficiently versatile’ (p. 63) to be included on the programmes of both serious and popular-music concerts, and presented in a variety of guises to suit specific ends (including a duet for piano and pianola, [p. 82]). Performances ranged from those in churches, aimed at drawing the public into ‘a specifically devout milieu’ (p. 68), to the piazza evening entertainments at Long Beach on Long Island during the budding of American resort life in the 1880s. Accordingly, the line between private and public performance spaces began to disappear, as the piano duet became a popular choice for performance at school events, in youth clubs in America and at a ‘fashionable concert’ (p. 17) in Belfast in 1880.

Chapters 2 and 3 continue to impress the work’s flexibility through a consideration of its various transcriptions. August Manns, who gave the British première of the Ninth Symphony in 1856, adapted the march for full orchestra in 1860, and conducted it often at the Crystal Palace. Notwithstanding the popularity of this orchestral version in England, the arrangement that was responsible for bringing Schubert’s march to wider public attention was a solo piano adaptation by Carl Tausig (Liszt’s pupil) written in 1869. The dazzling list of performances by Sophie Menter, Carl Wolfsohn and especially Teresa Carreño confirm Messing’s claim that the march had ‘entered the DNA of international cultural consciousness’ (p. 40) by the 1870s and 80s. Carreño in particular became synonymous with the march (a 1908 issue of Die Musik published a satirical play containing, among other scenes, a lantern silhouette revealing Wagner kissing Eduard Hanslick and ‘Teresa Clavierreño thundering down the Schubert-Tausig Marche militaire’ [p. 37] in Fiji). The meticulousness of Messing’s research stands out in his record of US performances of Tausig’s arrangement by 14, 18 and even 24 pianists simultaneously (see Figure 2.3 on p. 48), an extraordinary visual display conjured up by his memorable description of such events as ‘magnificent dinosaurs whose metastasizing size signalled the gradual extinction of the works on exhibit’ (p. 49). Despite dwindling performances for solo piano in the post-war era, however, Tausig’s arrangement formed the basis of further transcriptions of the Marche militaire for full orchestra by Leopold Damrosch (1875), as well as a handful of continental arrangements in France, Germany and Russia.

The remarkable ease with which Messing’s familiarity with literary fiction combines with his impressive knowledge of world history is prominent in Chapters 4 and 6. In the former, Messing outlines how the reference to Schubert’s ‘Marche triomphale’ in Alphonse Daudet’s short story ‘Le siège de Berlin’ (1871, p. 87) was distilled into French memory as the Marche militaire, and was subsequently believed to have actually accompanied Prussian Troops as they marched into Paris in 1870 at the end of the Franco-Prussian war. This connection was revived at the height of the First World War, in 1916, when several Paris newspapers repeated Daudet’s son’s claim (originally printed in 1914) that, in a sign of offence, the German ambassador’s band had played Schubert’s march at an historic dinner attended by the French president in 1914. Such propagandistic appropriation of the Marche militaire continued into the Second World War where it became a symbol for Germany (paired with ‘Deutschland über alles’ in a Paris-Soir article in 1940 [p.104]) and ‘an avatar of despicable militarism’ (p.107) in French literature. Messing charts the work’s journey from Daudet’s narrative to its associations with Nazi Germany with considerable facility and authority.

Even in seemingly un-politicized circumstances, the Marche militaire became synonymous with the ‘dance of revolution’ (p. 132), either accompanying the liberating dance movements of Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller which represented social and gender equality, or as the prelude to openly politicized rhetoric in one of Duncan’s speeches at the Metropolitan Opera (p. 115). Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors could also rely on the public’s familiarity with the Marche militaire (p.134). As chapter 6 reveals, the work was associated with heroism (in Tausig’s arrangement in The Story of an Artist, 1891), quiet domesticity (in its original form in Huguette, 1891), amateur female performance (The Story of Ursula, 1895, and Virago, 1913), and, memorably, the final deed of a self-confessed music hater and doctoral student in psychology who performs Tausig’s virtuosic arrangement before he drops dead at the piano (‘The Rôle of Vision’, 1910).

Notwithstanding the inherent fascination of these associations – heightened by the author’s unique gift of bringing history vividly to life – Messing’s larger point relates to the position the work held in collective public consciousness: owing to its ubiquity, these artists could be confident that their audience members ‘were likely to have Schubert’s march in their cultural memory, whether as listeners or as performers, and that they would recognize its appearance’ (p. 145) in their dances and narratives. Given the extensive record of performances enumerated by Messing, it is difficult to argue with this point. He does not, however, venture to ask the more interesting question of what that memory might signify for an individual, and how it might impact upon his or her reception of the work. Surely one person’s experience of the march as a domestic piano duet evoking a cosy Biedermeier past, and another’s of an enforced performance for an SS officer at Auschwitz (p. 213) would stimulate diverse memories and extreme reactions to the march’s appearance in the new context. This argument could have been further developed by engagement with the substantial body of literature pertaining to the invocation of memory in Schubert’s music. The work of Scott Burnham, John Gingerich and Walter Frisch in particular, which asks whether the sense of recollection inherent in Schubert’s music may be understood as signifying a specific past, might profitably have been addressed here.Footnote ²

The lack of direct engagement with this body of scholarship is liberating and frustrating in equal measure: on one hand, Messing avoids what George Steiner termed academic scholarship’s ‘endless gallery of querulous echo’, and maintains a proximity to the primary text and a clarity of purpose that is wholly refreshing.Footnote ³ Moreover, the approach offers alleviation from the timeworn trope of the neglected Schubert (perhaps one of musicology’s more ‘egregious fictions about [Schubert’s] life’ [p.198]), replacing it with a celebration of a long and multifaceted posthumous reception. Conversely, this approach falls short of establishing Messing’s contribution within the context of existing Schubert scholarship. Without such contextualization, the book risks minimising the impact it exerts on future scholarship, even if that impact deserves to be substantial.

The kitschification of Schubert forms the focus of chapter 7’s treatment of the Marche militaire in early silent cinema and sound film. The work’s appropriation by Walt Disney’s animated films to accompany a marching toy band in Santa’s Workshop (1932), and in a contemporary swing-band arrangement when Mickey Mouse dances with a deck of playing cards in Thru the Mirror (1936) is surpassed only by the Warner Brothers’ Terror on the Midway (1942) which transforms Schubert’s march into a Cuban conga rhythm to accompany a line of dancing circus elephants (pp. 167–8). Bizarrely, this image provides a link to the final chapter on musical allusion in the guise of Stravinsky’s extended quotation of the work in his Circus Polka (also of 1942) which includes a ‘tutu-clad elephant … lumbering to a march of the composer who had been anointed as feminine by a tradition of which Stravinsky was well aware’ (p. 195). Here, as elsewhere in this book, Messing (perhaps unavoidably, given the origin of this research) assumes familiarity with Schubert in the European Imagination, and certain passages feel more at home in the earlier publication. For instance, Schubert’s Mädchencharakter comes to the fore during Messing’s evaluation of contemporary reviews of Duncan’s troop of female dancers (p. 128), and elsewhere Messing notes that the diverse uses of the Marche militaire had little effect on the more ‘durable image of the benign composer of dulcet sentimentality’ (p. 107). The significance of such statements is certainly easier to grasp for a reader familiar with Messing’s earlier work and with the substantial debates surrounding Schubert’s sexuality. Again, the text would benefit from further contextualization of these issues.

In marked contrast to such omissions, the author’s diligence in uncovering all possible angles from which to explore this work occasionally leads to unnecessary digressions, such as the rather speculative exploration of a link between Stravinsky’s use of the March militaire in his Circus Polka and Vladimir Horowitz’s Carnegie Hall recital on 30 January 1942 featuring Tausig’s arrangement (pp. 196–9). Similarly, the lengthy (and ultimately unresolved) consideration of who first used the march in performance – Duncan or Van Axen – adds little to the global argument, or to our appreciation of the work (pp. 125–7). One cannot help wishing that equivalent space had been granted to direct engagement with the music. Messing’s analysis of the Marche militaire is confined to the relatively short section ‘the score: style and meaning’ (pp. 9–13). It focuses on the subtle foreshadowing of harmonic shifts in the chromatic ‘flecks’ (p.9) of the march’s B section, and the significance of the fourfold repetition of the dominant pitch which he identifies as Schubert’s ‘bell motive’ (p.11) owing to its correspondence with ‘De Baches Wiegenlied’ (Die schöne Müllerin) and ‘Das Zügenglöcklein’. Both of these techniques resonate with Schubert’s mature practices, and ascribe a certain level of sophistication to the march that might have been more meaningfully pursued. Moreover, a similar level of detailed discussion might have been afforded Tausig’s arrangement given its centrality to the book, as well as its more demanding musical language. One is left wondering what such an exploration might have revealed about the compositional potentialities of the work in Tausig’s (or indeed Liszt’s) hands.

These reservations aside, and acknowledging that certain omissions are unavoidable, the book’s overall impression is both effective and immensely enjoyable. One of the most striking achievements of this monograph is its ability – mirroring its subject matter – to permeate aesthetic and intellectual boundaries. What Messing has accomplished in Marching to the Canon is at once a thoroughly engrossing popular history that speaks to a broad readership, and a sophisticated critique of the permanence of the musical canon, and its continued centrality in musicological thought. Adorno’s attempts to rescue the Marche militaire from what he saw as its vulgar popularization at the hands of ‘seething humanity’Footnote ⁴ notwithstanding, the work’s popularity as ‘one of the most famous pieces of world literature’ rendered it unsuitable for admission into the musicological canon.Footnote ⁵ In Messing’s hands, this very popularity becomes a sign of something ‘at once durable and resilient’ (p. 213). He sets the adaptability of this repertoire against the permanence of the canon, reviving Joseph Kerman’s epithet that ‘repertories are determined by performers [authors, dancers, filmmakers], canons by critics’.Footnote ⁶ The result is a model for what can be achieved if one abandons the strict separation of popular and high music, and engages in their permeability. Marching to the Canon urges us to take pleasure in that which the canon excludes, to relinquish the burden of reclaiming Schubert’s march for the musical connoisseur and to delight in its unparalleled cultural status. Adorno’s challenge, we are reassured, is not ours today.